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biographie
Elena Pérez Lagüela holds a PhD in Economics from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, where she also completed Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in International Relations and International Economics and Development, respectively. She specializes in the Political Economy of Development. She studies contemporary resource-led development strategies, focusing on agricultural development and the energy transition in peripheral-dependent economies. She is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied and Structural Economics and Economic History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Elena is a member of the African Studies Group at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and the research group “Political Economy: Capitalism and Unequal Development” at Complutense. She has also been a visiting researcher at SOAS, University of London (UK) and a postdoctoral researcher at Complutense University of Madrid, the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance (University of Cape Town, South Africa), and the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Relações Internacionais (CIS) in Luanda (Angola).
short
biographie
Elena Pérez Lagüela holds a PhD in Economics from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, where she also completed Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in International Relations and International Economics and Development, respectively. She specializes in the Political Economy of Development. She studies contemporary resource-led development strategies, with a focus on agricultural development and the energy transition in peripheral-dependent economies. She is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied and Structural Economics and Economic History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Elena is a member of the African Studies Group at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and the research group “Political Economy: Capitalism and Unequal Development” at Complutense. She has also been a visiting researcher at SOAS, University of London (UK) and a postdoctoral researcher at Complutense University of Madrid, the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance (University of Cape Town, South Africa), and the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Relações Internacionais (CIS) in Luanda (Angola). .
contribution to the project
Elena’s work is concerned with the study of the role that states have in contemporary development processes in peripheral-dependent economies. Following a historical-structural approach, she studies resources-based development, focusing on agricultural-led and mineral-led industrialization processes in African economies. For Extractivism, she will work on resource nationalism using the Morocco-Western Sahara conflict as the unit of analysis and the implications that Morocco’s green industrialization and energy transition strategies have in a context of accumulation by dispossession at the expense of an even more peripheral, occupied and fragmented, territory.
recent publications
Hernández Martínez, D., & Pérez Lagüela, E. (2017). Análisis de la sostenibilidad del modelo económico venezolano: chavismo, petróleo y distribución de la renta. Iberoamerican Journal of Development Studies, 6(2), 148-174. VIEW PUBLICATION
Pérez Lagüela, E. (2017). El metabolismo de la economía china. Una visión del desarrollo desde la Economía Ecológica. Revista de Economía Mundial, 47, 64-94. VIEW PUBLICATION
Pérez Lagüela, E. (2025). El papel del Estado en los procesos contemporáneos de desarrollo tardío. Diagnóstico de la experiencia etíope para ilustrar un debate renovado. Iberoamerican Journal of Development Studies, 14(2), 62-85. VIEW PUBLICATION
Pérez Lagüela, E. (2026). The political economy of growth and development in the Mediterranean. In D. Hernández Martínez & A. Martini (Eds.), International relations in the Mediterranean region: Political challenges and global dynamics (pp. 149–181). Palgrave Macmillan. VIEW PUBLICATION